Editor's note: The above video shows Texas Longhorns' mascot Bevo breaking out of his pen before the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 2019.
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- The Texas Longhorns kick off the season this Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, against the Ohio State Buckeyes. But the biggest Longhorn, Bevo, won't be there.
Bevo -- a 2,100-pound, 10-year-old steer -- is the live mascot for the University of Texas at Austin. His handler, Ricky Brennes, said it "didn't seem like a wise decision" to bring the bovine to Ohio for this game.
"If it would have been a postseason game, I think we absolutely would have inquired about bringing him," Brennes said.
Brennes, the executive director of the Silver Spurs Alumni Association (the group responsible for transporting and handling Bevo), said the trip to Columbus this early in the school year would have taken a lot of time away from the students in the association. Plus, the travel time isn't ideal for Bevo himself, either.
"For us to have brought Bevo to Columbus -- today is Wednesday, we would've left yesterday, and yesterday was the second day of school -- it probably would have been at least an 8-day round-trip for us to bring Bevo up there," Brennes said. "We limit his trailer time to about 6-7 hours a day, and so it's just a lot of time on the second day of school to pull our students out for six days, and then we turn around and have three home games in a row... It just didn't seem like the wise decision to make."
The drive from UT Austin to Columbus without pulling a trailer holding a giant steer inside is over 18 hours by car.
Brennes said when he and Bevo's handlers do travel with him, they'll stop and let him stretch and walk around a bit every three or four hours. The trailer he travels in has room for him to lay down, but Brennes said he doesn't seem to do that very much, so the Silver Spurs try to limit the amount of time he's traveling within a day.
"I mean, we could... theoretically, you know, do eight, nine hours. But we're not going to try to knock that out in one day or two days," Brennes said. "We're going to take our time with it and... when we're traveling, we look for places with, you know, Longhorn lumps, or people that... maybe they've got Longhorn cattle themselves, and we'll find some place to keep them overnight, you know, when we're stopping."
Brennes said Bevo does not stay in the trailer overnight when he travels, so they have to find a pasture for him to stay in overnight.
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Bevo should make appearances at the three games following the Longhorns' top 5 showdown against Ohio State this weekend.
Those games will be the Longhorns' home opener on Sept. 6 against San Jose State, a home game against UTEP on Sept. 13, and a Sept. 20 home game versus Sam Houston.
